The Story of Yorick
Yorick is the last Shepherd of Souls on the Shadow Isles — the last practitioner of a religious order that was dedicated to guiding the dead to their rest, whose entire congregation was destroyed when the Ruination consumed the Blessed Isles. He survived because he was in a prison cell at the time, locked up for an act of mercy that his order considered an unacceptable deviation from proper ritual. The irony has not escaped him.
He can raise the dead — the spirits of those who died on the Shadow Isles, drawn to him by the Maiden of the Mist who accompanies him, organized into a ghoulish entourage that he directs with a rusty shovel. This should be horrifying and in most contexts is. For Yorick it is the practical expression of his theology: the dead are not gone, they are waiting, and the Shepherd's job is to attend to them regardless of their current condition. He attends. He shovels.
He is trying to free the Shadow Isles — to end the Ruination's perpetual death-state, to give the trapped souls their rest, to restore the Blessed Isles to something approaching what they were. He knows this is an enormous task for one man with a shovel and some ghouls. He continues because he was trained to continue regardless of the odds, because his theology doesn't provide an exit condition short of success, and because the alternative is leaving the dead to the Mist indefinitely, which is not something a Shepherd does.